The actual problem
When working as an information security consultant, I often encountered clients whose staff each had their own spreadsheets to help them with their jobs. Some were quite small, others quite intricate*. Doing my good old BS7799, and later ISO27001 reviews, I had to inform the clients that they had major risks with these spreadsheets as they:
0. Had been built by amateurs,
1. Had not been tested,
2. Had not been verified,
3. Are only 'understood' by the person who used them,
4. Probably had no error checking, or even type checking,
5. Were only available to the person who built them,
and
6. Were vital to the business.
In addition, many contained personal information of external contacts, and so should be registered with the ICO. (One client admitted to having 300, yup three hundred, separate sets of personal information each run by an individual.)
I don't know about you, but surely it is not beyond the wit of woman to create some sort of software 'application' that organises information into a standard form, so that it can be presented in an intelligible form, and maybe even passed to other applications for their processing. A sort of Base where the Data could be kept, and used like, as we Mathematical Logicians call it, an 'Oracle', to answer queries. (Silly me, of course not, I guess I am just ahead of my time here.)
I'll get my coat, coz, well, it is time for lunch :o)
*I'm referring to the spreadsheets, not the staff here, although some of them were quite small.